Abrupt Mutations leads the reader on a humorous, meandering tour of 1960s Megalopolis, at the heart of which is a hotly anticipated gathering of the city's culturati at the home of O Jango, a Brazilian billionaire and aesthete equally revered and reviled by his fellow Megalopolitans.
--
Abrupt Mutations leads the reader on a humorous, meandering tour of 1960s Megalopolis, at the heart of which is a hotly anticipated gathering of the city's culturati at the home of O Jango, a Brazilian billionaire and aesthete equally revered and reviled by his fellow Megalopolitans. Parodying a number of literary styles, including the detective novel and science fiction, Revol's novel is first and foremost a Menippean satire of the cosmopolitan west in the sixties, detailing hilariously but humanely the lives of intellectual and artistic émigré's who have fled from dictatorships and found in their adopted city opportunities for personal freedom and pleasure they previously could never have dreamed of.
Enrique Luis Revol was a well-known Argentinian writer, critic, and translator. He was also a professor of English and French literature affiliated primarily with the National University of Cordoba, where he had taken a baccalaureate in Philosophy (1946) and a doctorate in English and French (1958). He authored five books of poetry, two story collections, and a novel. He also translated a wide array of fiction and philosophy, including works by Herman Melville, Czeslaw Milosz, Lewis Mumford, and George Steiner.